Legendary singer-songwriter and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee Steve Perry became a star with Bay Area band Journey, touring the world and selling platinum with every album release. Perry's last gig with Journey was in 1987 and he officially parted ways with the group in 1998. Since then, he's been hard to find...until now.

The iconic singer makes his long-awaited return with "Traces," his first new album in nearly a quarter century, out Friday October 5th, 2018 on Fantasy Records.

Perry introduces "Traces" with lead track “No Erasin’” and reassuringly greets fans with the opening line “I know it’s been a long time comin’.” The track is an emotional homecoming, a familiar welcome from the iconic voice and writer of Journey's timeless, global hits including “Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Faithfully,” and “Separate Ways" as well as the significant solo success of “Oh Sherrie” and “Foolish Heart.”

Perry says, “Putting 30 years into 10 songs has certainly been an emotional experience for me. I started writing and recording these songs with the creative freedom that I was the only one who would ever hear them. Along the way, I rediscovered my love for music. Each track represents traces of my past, but is also a hopeful look into the future.”

Steve called WZLX's Carter Alan and the two chatted about the legend's MIA status and moving forward with his new album.

Perry's good natured bonhomie & the world’s most charmin smile,knocked fans off their feet. Sportin a black tux,gigs came alive as he swished around the stage thrillin audiences w/ charisma that instantly burnt the oxygen right out of the venue.TR.com

Perry's good natured bonhomie & the world’s most charmin smile,knocked fans off their feet. Sportin a black tux,gigs came alive as he swished around the stage thrillin audiences w/ charisma that instantly burnt the oxygen right out of the venue.TR.com

I wish one of these interviewers would ask if he's read Cain's book and what he thought,of the parts pertinent to him.

Seven Wishes wrote:"Abysmal? He's the most proactive President since Clinton, and he's bringing much-needed change for the better to a nation that has been tyrannized by the worst President since Hoover."- 7 Wishes on Pres. Obama

okay maybe I missed this one. Crazy he was here in the Minnesota live interviews the day of his single release. Talks about the Eels show in Saint Paul, which still p*sses me off as its like a 15 min bike ride away.If there is a station in the twin cities that would play him, this would be the only one. Hope they are. Its way to indy for me but to have him on was pretty cool. Even does a little bit of Purple Rain and Aretha, but only a lite vocal.

scarab wrote:okay maybe I missed this one. Crazy he was here in the Minnesota live interviews the day of his single release. Talks about the Eels show in Saint Paul, which still p*sses me off as its like a 15 min bike ride away.If there is a station in the twin cities that would play him, this would be the only one. Hope they are. Its way to indy for me but to have him on was pretty cool. Even does a little bit of Purple Rain and Aretha, but only a lite vocal.

Perry's good natured bonhomie & the world’s most charmin smile,knocked fans off their feet. Sportin a black tux,gigs came alive as he swished around the stage thrillin audiences w/ charisma that instantly burnt the oxygen right out of the venue.TR.com

next song drops next week. hopefully he will do some tv interviews in the next few weeks. I still cant believe all the interviews he did in the first two weeks. (and the crazy thing so many in the studio ones). Hope he had a private jet

Have heard no erasin' a couple times on the current in mpls. I dont listen to but the guy I share a work space does.

Still think it was cool he started them here in the twin cities.

a man, well, he'll walk right into hell with both eyes open. But even the devil can't fool a dog!"

scarab wrote:next song drops next week. hopefully he will do some tv interviews in the next few weeks. I still cant believe all the interviews he did in the first two weeks. (and the crazy thing so many in the studio ones). Hope he had a private jet Have heard no erasin' a couple times on the current in mpls. I dont listen to but the guy I share a work space does.

Still think it was cool he started them here in the twin cities.

I'm sure he doesn't fly commercial

The injury that we do to a man must be such that we need not fear his vengeance. Steve Perry

Former Journey lead singer Steve Perry has been in isolation for almost 25 years. In a heart-wrenching story about death, Steve tells Pete WHY and WHO made helped him make a comeback. Steve also answers IF he’ll ever reunite with Journey and how the 2005 White Sox got his phone number to bring him to town.Take some time and listen to one of the best interviews this year!

- hotdogs and French fries

Perry's good natured bonhomie & the world’s most charmin smile,knocked fans off their feet. Sportin a black tux,gigs came alive as he swished around the stage thrillin audiences w/ charisma that instantly burnt the oxygen right out of the venue.TR.com

New Steve Perry song, football picks for the new season, thee worst pizza ever, Kenny Loggins and much more in this episode of The Mike & Carla Morning Show!

- 15.25 -- Kenny tried to find / get Steve to sing ''Don't Fight It' on his PBS Special

Perry's good natured bonhomie & the world’s most charmin smile,knocked fans off their feet. Sportin a black tux,gigs came alive as he swished around the stage thrillin audiences w/ charisma that instantly burnt the oxygen right out of the venue.TR.com

Last edited by tater1977 on Tue Sep 11, 2018 12:52 am, edited 1 time in total.

Perry's good natured bonhomie & the world’s most charmin smile,knocked fans off their feet. Sportin a black tux,gigs came alive as he swished around the stage thrillin audiences w/ charisma that instantly burnt the oxygen right out of the venue.TR.com

Perry's good natured bonhomie & the world’s most charmin smile,knocked fans off their feet. Sportin a black tux,gigs came alive as he swished around the stage thrillin audiences w/ charisma that instantly burnt the oxygen right out of the venue.TR.com

Monday at 7:48am ET we talk to @StevePerryMusic on @963WDVD . He tells a great story about how he wrote one of Journey’s best songs in Detroit—and it’s not “Don’t Stop Believin’” @LaurenCrocker_ @MattyMcFlye

Blaine Fowler @BlaineFowler

We talked to @StevePerryMusic on @963WDVD. What a great guy! Here's the unedited interview. Please listen to it. One of my favorite interviews ever!

Perry's good natured bonhomie & the world’s most charmin smile,knocked fans off their feet. Sportin a black tux,gigs came alive as he swished around the stage thrillin audiences w/ charisma that instantly burnt the oxygen right out of the venue.TR.com

Steve Perry Quit Journey And Never Looked Back. Then Music Saved His Life Again.“I needed to get out. It wasn’t easy to keep walking,” the singer said about leaving music.By Lauren Moraski

Steve Perry returns with his first new solo album since 1994.&nbsp;MYRIAM SANTOSSteve Perry returns with his first new solo album since 1994. Imagine riding a motorcycle down an open road in the country, with alfalfa fields on both sides as far as the eye can see ― with a warm wind blowing in your hair and the sun beating down on your face.

That’s a lot of what singer Steve Perry has done since playing his last show with Journey in 1987. At the top of his game, he decided to walk away, leaving one of the biggest bands around. This after scoring hit after hit with “Don’t Stop Believin’,” “Faithfully,” “Open Arms” and “Separate Ways” ― on top of solo singles “Oh Sherrie” and “Foolish Heart.”

“I wasn’t going to walk away through the back door,” Perry told HuffPost. “That’s not walking away. That’s not returning to my hometown, my farm community and smelling the alfalfa again and going to my favorite ice cream parlor that my grandfather took his son ― my dad ― and my dad took me. And having delicious chocolate chip ice cream in Hanford [California]. I had to walk away.”

Though he has made a couple of appearances with Journey (most recently at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2017) and reunited for the 1996 Journey album, “Trial by Fire,” Perry has stayed largely quiet on the music front.

But now he’s finally ready to walk into the spotlight again. After more than two decades, Perry will unveil a full-length solo album. Called “Traces,” the set ― due Oct. 5 ― finds the former Journey singer performing his own material with that signature voice that has long been missing from music. For the first time in a long time, Perry found his passion for writing and recording again. The result is a new 10-track album with five bonus songs.

“They all have a special place in my heart … They are like children to me,” Perry said of his new songs. “We gave them the best that they needed before I let them go because once you send them out into the world, there’s not much you can do. … You got to kiss it goodbye and hope that it’s charged with the honest sincerity that you hope other people will experience.”

We caught up with Perry about his new music and what he’s been up to since leaving Journey.

How are you feeling in the lead-up to this release?

You know what? That is so kind of you to ask you how I’m feeling. Most people don’t do that. I’m all over the map emotionally. It’s so strange. I’m exhilarated. I’m anxious and excited. And I’m just pensive. There are just so many feelings coming out at the same time because it’s been so many years — I would say over 31 — that I’ve really gotten into this with the passion I have now. So I didn’t know that the passion for music would return. When I left the group, I left because the passion had left my heart and I felt like I was sort of singing by numbers, emotionally. I don’t think anybody noticed, but toward the end there, I was not connecting, and my passion for music that I had found when I was 5 or 6 years old that I brought with me into my life, and I just started to lose that, and it scared the hell out of me, and I couldn’t connect with my foundation, which I was pulling my singing from and my passion for writing music too. So it has so excitedly returned to me, and I’m really, really excited about it.

I think the fans — based on chatter online — are just as excited to hear from you. So I imagine that’s a good feeling too.

It is a very good feeling. It was not a popular thing to do. I had to walk away, but I knew in my heart that ... all I had left, really, as an option was to walk into the abyss of not knowing where I’m going, and I just knew I couldn’t stay where I was. And so I just threw my fate to the wind and went back to my hometown, which was a farm community in the central San Joaquin Valley in Hanford, California, where I was raised. It’s always been an agricultural town. It’s always been the cornucopia of the world, they used to call it back in those days, because it’s just amazing what grows there, from almonds to peaches to grapes to cotton and alfalfa. I tried to reconnect and though my family was all deceased, I needed to go home and reconnect to some of the feelings and the environment. I really emotionally needed that ― really bad. So I bought a Harley-Davidson and a storage unit, and I drove my Harley through the country roads of that area.

The album kicks off with the lyric “I know it’s been a long time comin’ since I saw your face.” It’s been so long since we’ve seen your face. You’ve said you’ve been invisible for 30 years. I know you had a girlfriend, Kellie Nash, who passed away and she was among the influences who got you back into music. Why did now feel like the right time to release “Traces”?

Well, Kellie and I found each other through [writer-director] Patty Jenkins, and we were together for a year and a half. And she had already been fighting stage 4 breast cancer, but you would never know it. We were living in Manhattan, and she was getting some treatment there that was actually working for her. We lived there for almost 10 months. But she knew something had changed, just before the time Hurricane Sandy hit. We came back to the West Coast. And then about two months later, I lost her on Dec. 12, 2012. So that was the big change in my life that … a heart isn’t really broken until it’s completely broken, and that was when it got completely broken. And I thought I had a pretty good heart, but it took me two, almost three years of grieving. And slowly I got the passion back for music that I had lost when I left the group years before. I just found this songwriting thing came back. You gotta understand how much that meant to me emotionally. And I started writing these songs. Some are happy. Some are sexy. Some are rock ’n’ roll. Some are about loss, but the record has all sorts of tones to it.

Perry says a possible tour will be discussed toward the end of the year.

How did the writing and recording process come to be?

Once I built the studio in my house and I got an engineer ... named Thom Flowers, he and I got together and started putting together all these sketches I had written. We just started accumulating and recording songs and reaching, I think, for the sincerity that I remember was the most important element of music that touched me when I was 5 years old. I remember when I was in Journey, there was a sincerity in the music, with my solo projects … and so we worked hard to reach that believable sincerity in the drum performance, in the guitar performance, with the bass, the background vocals, the lead vocals and the lyrics.

When you decided to take that break, did you ever imagine that it was going to be this long of a break?

I walked away with a sincere commitment to not ever come back. That’s the only real honest walk away that had to happen … I had to walk away. And yes, I buzzed my head. And yes, I gained 60 pounds. [Laughs.] I was walking into the wind as much as possible, and if, in fact, I was ever going to experience anything ― love and passion for music — again, then I’ll figure it out. And if not, I’m OK, because we could not have done what we did any better than we already did it in the time that was right to do it.

At the time, though, even though you were away, the music you created with Journey and your solo projects from earlier in your career lived on. What was that like, watching from afar?

That’s a great question, because they did have a life. They did have something in them that continued to touch people while the music business went into boy-band land and electronic drums. I must admit, though, I was slowly opening my heart to music, because in the beginning, all I could listen to was ambient music. I couldn’t listen to anything with vocals or melodies or singers. I was kind of PTSD for music when I quit. So slowly all this stuff started to change. And here comes this era of boy band and electronic music, and I really liked the songwriting of some of it. They were well-crafted, sweet songs. One that comes to mind is [singing the Backstreet Boys’ “As Long As You Love Me”] “I don’t care who you are, where you’re from, what you did, as long as you love me.” It was this whole other landscape with garage, alternative, boy bands, and somewhere on other channels, Journey stuff was still going on. I don’t know what to say about that except that I was doing the best I could to keep walking and not feel too bad about taking care of myself, because I needed to get out. It wasn’t easy to keep walking.

Would you consider that one of the biggest risks you’ve ever taken in your life ― to walk away?

I think “risk” would be the wrong word. I would say the biggest necessity. I think that emotionally and foundationally I needed to throw myself into my hometown ― see friends, go to the fair in the summertime. At that time, my aunt was still alive. I used to take her to lunch in the ice cream parlor. … I was doing family stuff.

When you look at your life, what do you want your legacy to be? What do you want people to know about you?

Wow, I never thought about [that]. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know. I am getting older — I should start thinking about that, perhaps. Uncle Steve is no spring chicken, that’s for sure. … Well, I think it’s just ― Steve Perry was someone who was touched by music when he was 4 or 5 years old. His father was a singer, and I think in his DNA something resonated with him too. And from that point on, I was never the same. I started listening to radio at an early age. I started buying music at an early, early age. And when I got into the double digits — 10, 12, 13 years old — I was into 45s. Through some of my friends of color, I discovered R&B music. And I wanted to know why it felt the way it did, why it made me feel the way it did. And I wanted to know why Sam Cooke killed me the way he did. And why Jackie Wilson was slaying it like he did. And why Aretha [Franklin], what is she doing? And Nancy Wilson. What is going on with the Four Tops? What do you mean, ‘Baby, I need your lovin’”? ... Do you know how hard it is to this day to write a lyric that rhymes one into the next, into the next ― to where it strings together like a golden thread and you’re just along for the ride? That’s tough! So those kinds of moments changed my life. They were life-sustaining. Especially when my parents got a divorce when I was 7. So my legacy is that music saved my life. And it continues to now.

The Huffington post was another great interview with Steve. But, there was another article below that that I clicked on...oh, geez...I didn't know about all that drama concerning some members of jrny and the White House!

Really surprised that Steve hasn't been on any TV shows. I thought for sure we would see him on Ellen. What a great story he as after being in isolation for 20+ years. I remember Journey was on there at least once.

jrny84 wrote:Really surprised that Steve hasn't been on any TV shows. I thought for sure we would see him on Ellen. What a great story he as after being in isolation for 20+ years. I remember Journey was on there at least once.

I'd bet he's on when the album releases..

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Steve Perry of Journey: “Things happened to me as a child. There was nowhere to talk it out, so I sang it out instead”Journey wrote “Don’t Stop Believin’”, the most downloaded song from the 20th century. When their lead singer quit, the band spent years trying to replace him. Finally out of hibernation, he tells his strange story.

In the small hours of 14 June 2007, the Queen guitarist Brian May sat worrying at his computer. The American rock band Journey had fired another lead singer: 41-year-old Jeff Scott Soto had been erased from the group’s website – shed, Brian observed in his blog, like a used pair of boots.

It wasn’t that Brian didn’t sympathise with the pressures on a middle-aged rock band burdened with touring millions of dollars’ worth of hits when their original frontman was indisposed. He laid out Journey’s options. 1. Throw in the towel. 2. Find a look- and sound-alike. 3. Go out under a different name (“unrewarding”). 4. Find a new frontman who steals a bit of the limelight for himself.

Journey are responsible for “Don’t Stop Believin’”, the most-downloaded song written in the 20th century. They have had five lead singers to date. The single component they’ve spent three decades cyclically seeking to replace is the voice of their frontman, Steve Perry, who came and went, and came and went – then disappeared. Any Journey singer needs to sound exactly like Steve Perry, and that is not easy. He must have a high “tenor altino”, reaching F#2 to A5, with a tone somewhere between Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin. The first time Perry quit the band was at the height of their fame, in 1987. He’d been nursing his dying mother, and considered retraining as a neurologist.

The second time he left, ten years later, was because the band were pressing him to have a hip operation, and he refused. The girlfriend of keyboard player Jonathan Cain dimly recalled a guy from another group she thought could hit notes as high as Perry could – so founder member Neal Schon tracked him down, and found him working as a maintenance manager for Gap, enjoying the security of his first pension plan.

The new singer, Steve Augeri, became known as “Steve Perry with a perm”. He took Journey’s hits to the arenas of middle America. As he did so, the real Steve Perry – who’d co-written those hits – rode a Harley Davidson through the San Joaquin Valley in California, back to where he was born.

Perry has been a virtual recluse for 25 years. He sits before me in a Whitehall hotel, dissecting a chocolate muffin and carefully dabbing crumbs from his lap. He speaks in metaphorical language: he once said that leaving his band was like “re-entering the earth’s atmosphere with no heat tiles on my face”. The San Joaquin valley reached 110°F in the summer, with fields of almond trees, cotton and alfalfa. The alfalfa became a symbol of his escape. “It holds so much moisture that when you come to an area where there’s an alfalfa field on the left and right, the temperature drops 15 degrees. So I’m out on my motorcycle, and those were the days before ‘helmets’ [he makes quote marks in the air] and the wind is in my hair and all of a sudden, well, I cooled off.”

No one knew what Perry did next. There was a rumour he’d invested in a small bovine insemination business in California’s Central Valley, but it turned out to be a rogue edit on Wikipedia. In what some might call a terrible irony, the band he left behind enjoyed an unexpected, international renaissance without him, attracting a new generation of fans. In the 21st century, “Don’t Stop Believin’” was used on the soundtracks of the Oscar-winning 2003 film Monster, Scrubs, Family Guy, Glee and perhaps most memorably, in the final eerie moments of The Sopranos. It inspired long-read journalism on the magic of song craft, and it even formed the plot of the Broadway hair metal musical Rock of Ages.

Perry banked the cheques – but he missed the shows, because there was a new lead singer in the band who sounded just like him, and this time everyone was talking about it. Arnel Pineda was a Filipino fan who’d spent two years living homeless on the streets of Manila as a child – Neal Schon had found videos of him singing Journey songs on YouTube. Pineda has enjoyed the most successful stint in the job since the man he is imitating. Find a frontman who steals a bit of the limelight for himself, said Brian May, and “the sky’s the limit”.

When not riding his motorbike through the San Joaquin Valley, Perry attended the local fair, which came to his home town in June as it had done in his childhood. “I was drawn to the circus life, because they’d come into town – it was lights, Ferris wheels, it was moving, it was fantasy – and the next thing you know they’re gone,” he says. The circus was, he admits, not unlike a rock band.

“I saw Pinocchio as a child, and there was something evil about this special place where all the children could go. They’d go on the rides, but their ears would grow – and they turned into asses, actually, I guess.”

Rock bands are a ruthless business, but in Journey it’s hard to say who holds the power – the mutable frontman who forced the band in and out of hibernation for a decade, or the founder member who turned the frontman’s voice into a million-dollar franchise. Perry once claimed that he’d never felt part of the group. Schon replied: “How can you ‘not feel part’ of something you’re almost completely controlling?”

They only communicate through their lawyers now. But their songs play in every sports bar and mall in America, instantly and innocently evoking the pain and passion of ordinary human life.

Perry has watched his replacements come and go, but once, he was the replacement himself: in 1977, aged 28, having failed in several bands, he’d returned home to work mending coops on his uncle’s turkey ranch when he got the call from Neal Schon, asking him to join a jazz fusion band who couldn’t get a hit. Perry asked his mother, and she advised him to go for it. Schon tried him out by bringing him on the road and telling everyone he was the roadie’s Portuguese cousin. He sang a song at soundcheck when the official singer was away from the stage.

The clichés – “married to music”, “a band is like a family” – are well worn, but for the generation of men who became millionaire rock stars in the seventies and eighties (for it is men, and it is one generation) they are the only way to understand their motivations, not least because it is a language they invented themselves. Solo albums were referred to by Journey’s manager Herbie Herbert as cheating on your wife (both Schon and Perry cheated). Of the hip operation stand-off, Perry says: “When they told me they checked out some new singers, it’s like your boyfriend saying ‘Look, I really love you, but I need to know if we’re getting married or not because I’ve checked out some other chicks.’”

But it was more than that, wasn’t it? They were telling him they’d only take him back if he underwent major surgery.

“OK,” says Perry. “It’s like saying, ‘By the way, drop a few pounds, too. Get your nose fixed at the same time.’ FUCK OFF.”

He then asks if we can talk about his new record, Traces, his first in 25 years.

When Perry was 16 years old, he heard “I Need You” by the Beatles, released on the Help! album, and he felt they could have done better. Why had they done a kind of bossa nova he wondered, when it clearly cried out for R&B? He has reworked the song on his new album, which he wrote and produced on his own – “No one had their foot on my neck saying, ‘Are you done? Are you done?’ FUCK OFF.” he says.

When he was very young, Perry would “mumble hook lines” for potential songs, and it was in Journey that he was able to “apply everything I had ever dreamed of”. Their audience – suddenly full of girls – had a new and emotional relationship to the band via their commercial power ballads.

“You can’t solo for 18 bars,” he recalls telling Neal Schon – who was such a good guitarist that he’d been recruited by Carlos Santana aged 15, in the summer of 1969. “You can have about eight bars. And if it’s going to be eight bars, it has to be something beautiful.”

The first time the pair were put together to write, they finished Perry’s love letter to San Francisco, “Lights”, in about ten minutes. He describes a song idea as a “sketch” – a framework of chord changes, a couple of melody ideas and a loop for rhythm. “But my problem is, I hear it completed already.”

Songs, he says, should be “like pancakes – stacked high with layers of feeling”. Modern writing is an “industrial assembly line because everyone’s on the grid. There’s 20 people writing these songs – they’re trying to maximise the individual assignments, like when they’re making a film, to increase the opportunity for a hit. But a song should be all about selling a feeling.”

Selling a feeling – is that the essence of power ballads?

“It’s the essence of music,” he says.

“Don’t Stop Believin’” has had a lot of analysis in recent years, as interest has grown in the industry’s backroom magic. It is a power ballad with a strange minimalism, full of barely-there figures – “strangers waiting” and “streetlight people”. Unable to sleep in a Detroit hotel room, Perry had looked down to the street and noticed the way in which walkers would pop up suddenly in circles of light. The lyric’s “midnight train” was a musical madeleine, designed to take you back to Gladys Knight. The song was self-consciously cinematic, but states that life is a movie that never ends. Its thin but powerful sense of hope was so abstract, it applied to everyone – from the gambler in the lyric, rolling the dice “one last time”, to the real John Doe hearing “Don’t Stop Believin’” in a bar on a Friday night. It started with a refrain written by Jonathan Cain: what Cain heard as a chorus, Perry heard as a “pre-chorus” – suggesting that a “chorus of choruses” should be held off till the very end. It does not appear until three minutes and 20 seconds, delaying the climax. Perry gets a bit antsy discussing it.

“I don’t want to talk about the music because then you won’t listen, and it won’t be yours,” he says. “Your definition – what the song does to you, and the next person – are totally different. You hear music differently based on your life, your experience, what you are. When something resonates with a massive number of people, that is exactly what is happening.”

In 2007, he was approached by HBO for permission to use the track in the final seconds of The Sopranos. He refused to give it over without knowing what scene it would accompany, concerned that the entire Soprano family were going to “get whacked” to the song. For a few weeks, he was one of the only people in the world who knew how the series ended.

Another, equally effective modern-day licensing of the track was in Patty Jenkins’s Monster, when the serial killer Aileen Wuornos, played by Charlize Theron, meets her lover at a roller rink. A jukebox and a skating rink were just the kind of places you heard Journey every day, growing up, reinforcing the sense of their music as part of the wallpaper of American life. Perry, now 69, loved high school, “a magical time, when innocence is running your life.” Its memories are his songwriting metaphors: a concert venue, he says, rather strangely, is “the backseat of a car”.

“Everything I write comes back to high school. I know it sounds funny, but everything. It all comes from the emotions I grew into during my adolescence. Those moments are not to be tossed away.” He becomes emphatic. “If something means something to you, go back and get it and make it part of your life. And anyone who doesn’t understand how important that is, you tell them to FUCK OFF,” he advises, before breaking off to reveal he is desperate for the bathroom.

Perry was born to Portuguese parents in 1949. His father, Ray, was a singer – a baritone – who had tried to break into the business, and performed in the local theatres of his hometown. What kind of music did he sing?

“‘Pennies from Heaven,’” Perry replies.

His parents eloped because his mother’s father didn’t approve of a singing career. He tells their story as though music were some kind of hereditary condition or family curse, which in the case of Perry, you kind of feel it might be. His parents split when he was eight years old, and he, an only child, moved with his mother to his grandparents’ dairy farm – which might explain the rumours about his subsequent career. As with many rock stars, from Roger Waters to Lennon, the absent father was significant. I ask him why he became a singer.

“People don’t become performers because they don’t have needs,” he says. “Singing, though it can be very lovely, is essentially a primal scream. And I was screaming pretty loudly – and quite big.”

He was an invisible child, he says, but also a silenced one.

“There was a lot going on but nowhere to take it. Things happened to me as a child that I still can’t talk about – nothing to do with my parents, but things did happen. It happened to a lot of kids, as I find out.”

How old was he?

“About nine. But there was nowhere to take that stuff back then. One of my needs to perform was the need to get myself heard. Now, please, do understand, I’m not complaining – but there was nowhere to talk it out, so I got to sing it out instead.”

He spoke to a professional at the age of 63 about what had happened to him at nine. He was advised to do so by the woman he calls the love of his life, Kellie Nash, a psychology PhD candidate. But like everything else that has happened to Perry, theirs was not a conventional story.

During his mysterious, fallow years, Steve Perry seems to have investigated an alternative career in filmmaking. He was “shadowing” Monster director Patty Jenkins: “I love editing, I love directing. So with Patty I watched and learned a lot.” Jenkins was working on a TV film called Five for the Lifetime Network, exploring the impact of breast cancer. Being a methodical director, she surrounded her cast with real patients in remission. One of them – Nash – caught Perry’s eye. Jenkins then told him that Nash’s cancer had returned, was in her bones and lungs, and that she was fighting for her life. He went ahead anyway.

“I’d lost my mother,” he says. “I’d not reconnected with my father – which was another clean-up waiting to happen. I’d lost the grandparents who raised me. And I’d lost this career that I’d wanted so much, because I’d walked away from it.”

Was he so accustomed to losing things that a date with Nash didn’t scare him?

They had a year and a half together before Nash died in 2012. One night she said, “Promise me you won’t go back into isolation, for I feel that would make this all for naught.” He repeats the strange words, wide-eyed: all for naught. It was then that he decided to return to music.

“Life gets undone,” he says. “You try to come up with a plan, but it’s good for ten minutes a day. Some people have an ability to make belief systems work for a lifetime, but I think they’re hard to keep up.”

In 2014, he made world news when he turned up unannounced at a gig by the indie band Eels and performed their song “It’s a Motherfucker” along with two of his own. He’d not sung live for 19 years but, explained the band’s Mark Everett, “For some reason only known to him, he feels like tonight in St Paul, Minnesota, it feels right.”

Perry, the once-invisible only child, still talks about Journey as a “nucleus” he could never break into. It is fair to say that the band didn’t want him at first – it was only under the orders of their manager that he was hired at all. They came to epitomise corporate rock. “There are still things I don’t like about it,” Neal Schon once said, “but this is the way I make my living.”

You suspect that, creatively, both men might have been better off without the band – the jazz rock boy-wonder, and the hit-writing soul mogul who really wanted to be on his own. But you take whatever route to fame is presented to you – and you follow the money: “I’d rather fail at being what I wanted to be,” Perry says, “than be successful being someone I didn’t.”

Something happened to him as a 9 yr old child...? I feel so sad for this..for all children who've had something happen to them and they couldn't "tell" anyone, or had to hide. My heart goes out to you all..you are innocent.

It sounds more like a movie than real life. A multi-platinum rock star, one of the greatest frontmen in music history, a guy so talented other rock stars like Jon Bon Jovi dub him “The Voice,” just walks away from music. As he said, “Years ago, I disappeared.”

There were health issues that prompted his retirement, but as former Journey frontman Steve Perry explained in an Instagram post on August 14 of this year, “Mainly my love for music had suddenly left me.”

Continuing the movie motif, Perry fell in love with the woman of his dreams, rediscovered his love for music and then she passed away in December of 2012 from breast cancer. Keeping a promise to her to not “return to isolation,” Perry is back with Traces, his first new album in almost a quarter of a century.

Perry said when we spoke recently, “This is a different Steve.” Older, wiser, having gone through so much, Perry puts the focus on emotions on this collection. It is very apparent on the album’s best moments, the beautiful “Most Of All,” the up-tempo “No Erasin’.”

Even if he says though it is a “Different Steve,” there is no denying it is “The Voice.” And for all of music it is damn good to have the Steve Perry back.

In a conversation I have waited years for as well, Perry opens up about being absent from music, finding other creative endeavors, rediscovering his love for songs from Led Zeppelin and the Four Tops, getting the blessing from George Harrison’s widow Olivia to cover “I Need You” and stories of classic Journey songs.

Steve Baltin: I just spoke two weeks ago with Matt Johnson from The The, who was away from music for 18 years. And he said he was not going to come back if his passion for music never returned.

Steve Perry: Exactly, I love this guy.

Baltin: Were you sure the passion would come back? And if it didn’t were you okay with being permanently retired from music?

Perry: I absolutely was not looking for it, I was not in anticipation for any passion for music because it had left me. I knew I had to work forward and keep pushing forward with a conviction if it ever came, great. If it didn’t, very simply, then I had already done everything I ever could dream of doing the way it needed to be done in a time that you could possibly even do it in. So that was about it and I was committed to just living out my life with whatever came my way. But I did hang around with directors and writers of television and film. I watch other people rehearse or other people mix or other people do film mixing. I’m into all sorts of other creative things like that that became some sort of new passions for me, especially film mixing and film editing. That kind of came in handy when it came to making my own record because I was able to put my passion into editing into my own project. That fed me in a way, but if it didn’t come back I guess that would have been so be it.

Baltin: As an artist you never want to assume but certainly you have been aware how much interest there has been in you during this absence.

Perry: I don’t think there’s any way of knowing in advance what the consciousness of an audience that has been possibly waiting for new music could be like, meaning do they like “Most Of All”? Do they like “No Erasin’”? Do they like “Sun Shines Gray”? Do they like “No More Cryin’”? Do they like “We’re Still Here”? I don’t really have a preconceived idea or target writing or targeting any sort of crystal ball of the consciousness that exists with fans. I wish I did. I’m just a singer/songwriter who didn’t have passion for music, who rediscovered it. And when I did this is what came out. This is what showed up. Honestly I’m very proud of the emotions that are on the record. This is a record about emotions, about feelings. It isn’t all sadness and loss. There’s rock and roll, there are reunion songs, there’s all sorts of happy things, gratitude songs. There’s a lot of stuff in there.

Baltin: It gets easier as you get older to keep things in perspective.

Perry: That’s true, you’re more willing to be who you are and what you are in spite of anything your mind might tell you. You just say whatever.

Baltin: But you also went through so much real life stuff, heartbreak and tragedy, that makes you realize music is secondary.

Perry: For me, it switched from perfection to emotional expression. It’s a different Steve now. It’s about emotional expression and being okay putting even more of that vulnerability and emotional expression out there. And if you don’t like it then that’s fine, if you do that’s great. If you’re not sure that’s fine because it’s life sustaining for me to take this path. The days of perfectionism don’t hold water anymore.

Baltin: Did you find turning to music like coming back to an old friend?

Perry: I think what I’m looking for and hoping for is the emotional life-sustaining interaction that music can provide not just for people, but I hope for me. I’m gonna go in and get it and if I love it, it’s moving me, I can only wish and hope that it’s gonna move somebody else the same way. I can’t predict that it will. The only compass I have is the one in my chest and that’s the one I listen to. That’s the one I’m back to, that’s the one that’s new and brand new. Man, if I was young as my heart right now, watch the f**k out. The problem is my body is not. I’m doing the best I can to keep up with my heart, which is young and fresh right now.

Baltin: What was the music you went back to making this record?

Perry: When I was able to go back to music that mattered to me when I was growing up in Hanford, California I was really, really reinvigorated by rediscovering “Cupid” by Sam Cooke. There are several songs that started to come back to me. “Baby I Need Your Loving” by Levi Stubbs when he was in the Four Tops. That song is a time stamp for me, I’m in the back of a yellow ’57 Chevy with a senior who had to drive, I could not yet, and double dating to the prom, and that song came on the radio. I’ll never forget that song and the second verse I’ll never forget as long as I live. “Some say it’s a sign of weakness/For a man to beg/Then weak I’d rather be/If it means havin’ you to keep/’Cause lately I’ve been losin’ sleep.” You cannot write a lyric like that, than just runs like blood right through it, non-stoppable and hands itself to the next one, to the next. And it drops you, “Cause lately I’ve been losin’ sleep.” You cannot do that, it’s difficult. And these guys did it, they sold it. They captivated me in a minute with it. And to this day that’s another watermark I can only do my best to try and touch a piece of it cause it’s such an amazing thing. So to have discovered those songs again, the passion for those songs, or “Kashmir,” by Led Zeppelin, or “I Need You,” by George Harrison, which I covered because I love it so much.

Baltin: What made you cover that one?

Perry: I’ve never done a cover before. I’ve always loved the song “I Need You,” by the Beatles, it came out on the Help album. It was a beautiful song, it was a Bossa nova feel. I love the song, I used to sing it all the time. Here I am, just a young boy and I heard the song differently. Time goes by, I’m successful in the music business, so grateful to have done that. I leave, I’m gone, I start this record, Traces, and I turned to Thom [Flowers, co-producer] and I said, “I’ve always loved ‘I Need You.’” I dabbled with a few covers just for fun, but this one I wanted to do it and I did it differently. I had a rough sketch of it sitting in the drive. So Vinnie [Colaiuta] comes over one day, I played it for him. One pass he did it. That’s the demo vocal on “I Need You.” So I would not put my version, which is a bigger R&B sort of the song, if I could not get the blessing from Olivia Harrison. So Steve Ferrone played drums on the record ["Angel Eyes"] and he was going to do a benefit with Tom Petty in Vegas with Olivia and Dhani [Harrison]. I said, “Will you tell her I am covering George’s song and I’d love to play it for her.” Next day I have her email, she hits me on email, we talk. I go over there and I play this version. She listens to it all the way through, grabs the remote, switches it back to play again, I’m thinking, “There’s something about it she’s not sure of. If she doesn’t love it I won’t put it on the record.” She lowers the volume halfway through the second play and goes, “George would have loved it so much.” I got the blessing from Olivia, that’s why that song is on the record.

Baltin: Are there songs from your past you have a new appreciation for? Like I go back constantly to “Oh Sherrie.” And the video still cracks me up.

Perry: (Chuckles) I know. That came about, the label came up with a guy, came up to my house. We sat out there and we talked and it was some stupid like race car, “Dead Man’s Curve” sort of treatment where I was in a bar with her, we had a fight and she grabs your keys, jumps in the car and speeds off and she’s really pissed off, loses control of your sports car, has a wreck and then I jump on somebody else’s motorcycle and chase after her and she’s laying in my arms. It was this whole drama bulls**t. I said, “That’s not what the song’s about.” “Oh Steve, it will be great, it will be wonderful.” “That’s ridiculous.” I said, “What a minute, that’s the video. What we’re doing right now is you’re pitching me a dumbass idea, I’m saying, that’s ridiculous, it has nothing to do with the music. So that’s my video.” They went, “Oh wow, okay.”

Baltin: Are there Journey songs you have a new appreciation for?

Perry: That’s so hard, they’re all like some of your favorite children that over the years that have sustained the test of time. And it was nothing we could predict, nothing we had the secret crystal ball about, nobody had it. I mean “Don’t Stop Believin’” wasn’t showing itself to be what it turned out to be when we recorded it. Everything got the same amount of love and time, consideration completion required emotionally to survive because the songs as tracks have to be given all that so that when you let them go out in the world like children, you send them off to college, you hope they’re gonna do okay out there cause there’s not much else you can teach them now. So that’s what you do. When you have a song in your arms, a track in your arms and you’re working on, you’re overdubbing on it, mixing it, mastering it, you’re trying to give it what it needs to complete itself and survive without your help in the world. So all the songs got that same attention, that same loving support. So time and the fans have decided which ones they have decided to embrace. It certainly isn’t something that we had a crystal ball about. “Stone In Love” is one, “Oh Sherri” is another one, “Foolish Hearts,” “Don’t Stop Believin’” obviously, “Separate Ways,” “Who’s Crying Now.” I can tell you a story about “Who’s Crying Now,” that they wanted to fade that solo and I was the one who told Neal [Schon] let’s do a solo that late night morning. I said to Neal, “I saw you play the Starwood with a Fender Twin just leaning back with a white strap and a Wah Wah pedal. Why don’t we just plug that in? Forget the rig and the massive…just plug it in and sketch a little bit.” We sketched in about four different drop-in sections and that is the solo that’s on “Who’s Crying Now.” The label wanted to fade it cause it was too long for radio, radio wouldn’t play it if you left it that long. I said, “I am not fading that solo.” And I don’t think Neal even knows that I fought the A&R guy. “We are not fading that solo. You tell Neal you’re fading that solo cause I’m not telling him that, we’re not fading that solo. They can pull out and go to the news if they want to, the radio station can makes the decisions, but do not fade that solo.” And I’ve never once heard that song played where the whole solo does not get played because it’s excellent.

Baltin: What are the touring plans?

Perry: If I do go on tour I will certainly play a nice amount of songs from the album Traces, most certainly. It’s gonna be a torture for me to not play the whole thing. But also if I go on tour you bet your ass I’ll be playing the Journey songs because it’s a part of my life, a part of my history. I think everything will be a challenge as to what doesn’t get played.